…and now we return you to our regularly scheduled programming…..

…and now we return you to our regularly scheduled programming…..

Edy and I awoke to a quiet house this morning. VERY quiet.

Weeks of sharing the middle of the bed with spontaneous “ninjas”, sounds of harmonic snoring and little voices of “grammy, grammy, grammy” in the early morning have been replaced with the familiar drone of the “wave machine” ; JUST the wave machine…………... CRAP !

Despite loads of practice, a lot of pre-minding and much preparation; it happens every time……..REALITY steped out of the corner and grinned…………. “IIIIIiiii’m baaaaa-aaaack”.

It’s much harder on Edy than it is for me and my heart breaks for her longing to have all of her brood surrounding her constantly. Her tender heart just wants them all here 24/7, which is not currently possible. It puts me in a place of “powerless-ness” that eclipses the other places of “powerless-ness” I already feel. Hard places X2.

Lately we have been discussing the various “roles” we have taken on as we live each year. For me Son, student, worker, husband, father…….etc…Somewhere along the line I received some programming that told me that to live fully I needed to love & be loved & be useful & be needed.  I pretty much had this tattooed in my being for decades and just last year started to question such programming, which then lead to other questionable programming which then lead to reverse engineering  of many other beliefs I have held forever which initiated a complete gesso’ing of the canvas that is ME. By the end of 2012 I was pretty well “white” with a  few areas of old poking through that even today I gesso over to make way for the new………….(whatever that is).

Sure, love is a wonderful and to be loved is super, BUT, to be useful and needed?

I’m now not too sure about these now as I always used my work to fall back on to “check off” whether or not I had accomplished said task. Last year’s project list has shown me that I’ve not been needed too much in that regard and therefore have not been too useful either, so I might as well embrace it for all it’s worth.  Sometimes when confronted with “powerless-ness”, I just want to withdraw completely and embrace it as yet another example of my usless-ness, regardless of the knowledge that there are many things that are just not under my control. Perhaps it’s just one of those “wisdom to know the difference” things?

Different months of last year were dedicated to among other things “thwarts”, “disappointments”, “insignificance”, “lost dreams” , now in 2013 “usless-ness” and within all of these “gratitudes”. Always, (in truth, almost always) the Gratitudes.  It has been a very important exercise to keep the gratitudes at the forefront as it is just way too easy to evoke the old tired program of sliding down the “slippery slope” …

What felt like thwarts were actually guard rails, disappointments turned out to be life rings, insignificance pointed back to what really matters, lost dreams opened doors for NEW Dreams and usless-ness…….well,  we’ll just have to stay tuned for what this one holds as it’s too early to know.

So for today, despite the missing, the empty house and the overall sadness - I give HUGE thanks for fun times we had together and the MORE fun times we are all certainly going to have in the future.